Mixed Race Studies

In so many ways, the dominant images and stories around mixed race identities in the U.S. revolve around folks who are half white, and/or whose mixed race identity gives them a proximity to whiteness that other mixed race folks and people of color don’t have. And while it’s important to talk about the complexities of being mixed race in a white supremacist society, it’s also important that we don’t default to re-centering whiteness in those conversations.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, “Mixed Doesn’t Always Mean Part White: Uplifting Non-White Mixed Race Identities,” The Body Is Not An Apology, July 8, 2019. https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/decentering-whiteness-on-facing-the-class-privilege-that-exists-in-mixed-race-asian-communities-beyond/.

Mixed Doesn’t Always Mean Part White: Uplifting Non-White Mixed Race Identities

The Body Is Not An Apology
2019-07-08

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
University of California, Berkeley

Growing up queer, mixed race, and Asian in the American South, my identity often felt like an absence of any identity at all. For a long time I existed in a kind of limbo state, not having a language to describe myself. Until my early twenties, I was unaware the word “mixed race” existed, much less as a term I had the option to identify with.

Because I neither knew nor saw any other mixed race children or people around me, for a long time my sense of self was only defined as a negation: I was certainly not white, and certainly not Japanese (at least by the standards of ethnic purity operative within my Japanese family and community). But as to what I was, actually, no one could really say.

So it was more than a breath of fresh air — more like a sense of psychic and spiritual relief — when I learned that such a thing as a mixed race identity existed, and that it was something I could identify as, with no other qualifications or explanations. When I finally encountered a community of other mixed race people during my twenties, I felt I was able to inhabit my body and experiences more fully and comfortably…

Read the entire article here.

As long as mixed race bodies and identities exist under a system of white supremacy, there will always be an implicit racial hierarchy among mixed race people, which celebrates lightness and whiteness and denigrates darkness and blackness.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, “DeCentering Whiteness: On Facing the Class Privilege that Exists in Mixed Race Asian Communities & Beyond,” The Body Is Not An Apology, February 15, 2018. https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/decentering-whiteness-on-facing-the-class-privilege-that-exists-in-mixed-race-asian-communities-beyond/.

DeCentering Whiteness: On Facing the Class Privilege that Exists in Mixed Race Asian Communities & Beyond

The Body Is Not An Apology
2018-02-15

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
University of California, Berkeley

[Featured Image: A person with shoulder length black hair wearing a black t-shirt and denim stands indoors staring solemnly out of a window. Pexels.com]

Growing up queer, mixed race, and Asian in the American south, my identity often felt like an absence of any identity at all. For a long time, I existed in a kind of limbo state, not having a language to describe myself. Until my early twenties, I was unaware that the word “mixed race” existed, much less as a term that I had the option to identify with.

Because I neither knew nor saw any other mixed race children or people around me, for a long time my sense of self was only defined as a negation: I was certainly not white, and certainly not Japanese (at least by the standards of ethnic purity that were operative within my Japanese family and community), but as to what I was, actually, no one could really say.

So it was more than a breath of fresh air—more like a sense of psychic and spiritual relief—when I learned that such a thing as a mixed race identity existed, and that it was something I could identify as, with no other qualifications or explanations. When I finally encountered a community of other mixed race people during my twenties, I felt I was able to inhabit my body and experiences more fully and comfortably…

Read the entire article here.

Upholding interracial marriage as proof that we have overcome racism reinforces the idea that racism is primarily about individual acts of prejudice, rather than about systemic (and collective) vulnerability to state violence.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, “No, Interracial Love is Not “Saving America”,” Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media, June 12, 2017. https://wearyourvoicemag.com/identities/race/no-interracial-love-not-saving-america.

No, Interracial Love is Not “Saving America”

Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media
2017-06-12

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

This year is the 50th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the famous Supreme Court case that officially overturned state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Predictably, this has been accompanied by a flurry of events, films, articles, and even songs celebrating this moment as a milestone in the history of America’s journey toward racial equality.

At a mixed race conference I recently attended, larger-than-life photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving, the white man and black woman whose relationship inspired the court case in 1965, adorned the walls. There and elsewhere, the Lovings were portrayed as “heroes” whose love valiantly overcame the racism of their time.

Just today, the New York Times proclaimed that interracial love was “saving America.”.

Statistics show that interracial marriages in the U.S. are on the rise, and this undoubtedly reflects a shift in attitudes toward race in the American population overall. However, there are several reasons why using interracial marriage as proof of racial progress in our society is not only misleading, but harmful.

First, state recognition of partnership often functions as a superficial symbol of progress, obscuring deeper issues of violence and inequality for the most marginalized members of a community. For example, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, many heralded this as proof that queer people had finally been accepted into mainstream society…

Read the entire article here.